Leverage, optimise, synergise

There are a few industries where consultants are really able to help out. No not through our provision of professional services, but merely as a result of our existence. One of them is the airline industry.

Consultants travel a lot – typically flying out to the client on Mondays and flying back home on Thursdays or Fridays. After about two years in consulting, you have flown almost all the airlines in the country (yes including WN) and you typically have Gold/Platinum/God status with all the above airlines. Here’s my gripe – in spite of having God status with the airlines, you are subjected to the following:

You are made to bear the indignity of standing in line with others at security.

You are given the same puny little seat as the ones given to the lesser mortals.

You are usually allocated the middle seat with two grossly overweight buffoons on either side (there goes your armrest).

Although, point 3 can be negated by securing an aisle seat when checking in online, you do not have any control over the pesky little kid sitting directly behind you (can’t they have a separate, sound-proofed, kid’s only area).

The FAs know and greet you by name (sometimes even with a smile), but they hesitate to give you the full can of coke or an extra packet of nuts on a transcontinental flight.

Airline food sucks! Whether you buy it or get it free, it sucks! It is too bad to make you sick; even bacteria do not thrive.

Time spent on the plane is time wasted; you can’t sleep as seats are too narrow and don’t recline along with the presence of the aforementioned Pesky Devil sitting behind you and you can’t work on presentations/spreadsheets because the tray table is too small to put your laptop on (anyway my laptop battery doesn’t last more than twenty minutes).

You can’t watch movies because, hey, domestic airlines do not believe in inflight entertainment – how cool is that!

The ratio of toilets to passengers in cattle class is a 100 to 1. You don’t need a PhD in mathematics to figure out how absurd this is.

10. On 3 out of 10 flights you are stuck for hours at some god forsaken airport because your connecting flight has been delayed.

To sum up airlines can often be like consultants in their genuine love and concern for their clients. Feel free to add to this list, I am sure this is not exhaustive.

“…all progress must depend on the unreasonable man” – George Bernard Shaw

I had heard about this website called twittershouldhireme.com, but never bothered checking it out – until today. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, it’s Jamie Varon’s unconventional attempt at getting hired by Twitter.

It is often said that necessity is the mother of invention. In tough times, when conventional methods do not yield dividends, those who manage to think out of the box and use their skills creatively, usually end up successful. This raises a question – why are we not creative in our daily lives? Why do we tend to follow established processes irrespective of whether they maybe the best way of doing things or not? Is it fear, insecurity, lack of interest, lack of time or just laziness? I don’t know. But I do know that it can change and should change – unless of course you are an auditor.

About

The ANALyst is a second year analyst at one of the world’s best known management consulting firms. After being a passive observer on the blog scene over the past year, he has finally decided to let loose, to enlighten the world about anecdotes from his profession – unedited accounts based on real-life experiences. He intends to continue to serve his current employer for another year before moving on to bigger and better things.

Update: The ANALyst has now quit his former employer in order to do some soul searching and is about to depart for an emerging economy.